Rambling, rumbling, rumination

TESOCraft Next

Not a lot of time around here, but I wanted to comment on this while it is vaguely relevant.

This TESO thing? Silly. Absolutely wrong for what Elder Scrolls games bring to the table, at least as far as I’m concerned. I played Morrowind for many hours, just noodling around, exploring the world and messing with things. Once I found a few mods, I did more tinkering. Sure, it could have been fun to have a good friend or family member in on the fun, but having a world full of other players with varied and often conflicting agendas, all screwing around? No, that’s not even close to the same experience.

Sure, maybe TESO will leverage the interesting setting and lore and such, but that’s not what interests me in the Elder Scrolls games. No, the gameplay’s the thing, and dealing with random internet people and the static modless world that an MMO generally has to be really isn’t adding anything to the gameplay. It’s wrecking it. TESO is a totally different sort of game, by its nature, and that’s not a bad thing, exactly… but when there’s a very clear split between the setting and the gameplay as is necessary in this case, I firmly come down on the side of gameplay.

Of course, EverQuest Next is playing around with terrain deformation a little bit, but again, that’s just griefer bait. I want to like it, I really do, but I just don’t trust people not to screw it up. If the solution is “the deformation goes away after a while”, we’re still just back to a weird sort of static world, it’s just a bit more pliable in the short term. Fun, in its own way, but really just another glaze of squishy paint on the theme park experience.

What I’d have loved to see from both of them is their own spin on Minecraft servers. As in, let players control their own populations, connect to each other on a whim (even directly via IP address instead of through official channels or *gasp* even a LAN), stop screwing around with subscriptions, and go all in and let the worlds really be modded and molded. Sell the game via a one-time fee, maybe rent out server space for those who don’t want to run their own, and let players really go nuts, again, like Minecraft. Contain them to their own, small population worlds where it really doesn’t matter if Leggolass142 makes a Lord of The Rings Mt. Rushmore, because his friends approved of the project.

That’s what I’d like to see as “innovation” in the MMO space. Not “Massively Multiplayer Online” games, but “Moldable Multiplayer Online” games, with small, private servers and a metric crapton of player agency.

That’s what I’d like to see as “innovation” in the MMO space. Not “Massively Multiplayer Online” games, but “Moldable Multiplayer Online” games, with small, private servers and a metric crapton of player agency.

Sounds like you are looking for Ultima Online. Some of the free worlds have some awesome custom content that actually give a lot of power to the player and for many years served as home to my guild. Very dated now though obviously. :)

muckbeast, indeed. MMOs can be awesome, but not everything really works as an MMO.

Joseph, indeed. Raph Koster popped in some time back on a different article of mine and suggested UO as well. Somehow I missed that one in its prime, but it’s on my list of “games to play when I can make the time”.

[…] there really is no disadvantage here profitwise – subs must win by a landslide. Meanwhile, Tesh is full of eyeroll over the TESO sub and declares personal boycott. While I have a soft spot where Tamriel is […]

“Sell the game via a one-time fee, maybe rent out server space for those who don’t want to run their own, and let players really go nuts, again, like Minecraft. Contain them to their own, small population worlds where it really doesn’t matter if Leggolass142 makes a Lord of The Rings Mt. Rushmore, because his friends approved of the project.”

This..so..much :)
I would’ve loved Skyrim to be distributed as online, selfhosted coop, oh how sweet sweet that could’ve been! so many MMOs could be played in so many new ways if they allowed for custom-rule servers. but even the sub-less still want to hold on to you for RMTs and expacs. makes you wonder though, given what niche this is, how many copies of a fully fledged ‘MMO world with MC-mode’ could be sold….it’s not like anyone has tried yet.

Sounds like something awesome. While I like the idea of Massively Multiplayer, I have often pointed out on my own blog that it is relatively small groups of friends that make communities in a game. And I am far more interested in Landmark than I am in the full-up EQN.

Aye, I think that in regular play, smaller groups dominate gametime. There is a larger network that comes into play with economies and Barrens chat, so there is some consideration there, perhaps, but I think there’s a nice bit of market and design space to play in for smaller social scale alternate “MMO” gaming.